Hong Kong Holiday by Emily Hahn

Author:Emily Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1945-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chick

I HAD LIVED FOR YEARS next door to Jap-occupied areas of China, and I had read a vast amount of stuff about the Japanese secret service. My mind was so full of information about Japanese methods that when at last the authorities in occupied Hong Kong set a man on me, I had the feeling that it had all happened many times before. They took their time getting around to me. They were short-handed after so many quick and easy victories; at first they didn’t have enough men in Hong Kong. Also, I can’t have been very important to them. That is why I was flattered, in a perverse way, that they gave me as good a man as Watanabe.

There is no English word to describe the official body to which Watanabe belonged. They call themselves the Kempeitai, which one can translate as the gendarmes, or military police, but they are much more than that. They are the Japanese Gestapo. They are envied and enviable, because, officially, they take orders from nobody but the Emperor, and everyone knows that actually they don’t even take orders from him. They do just what they like. The chief of the gendarmerie in Hong Kong really rules the roost. There is a Japanese governor, put there for show, but it is always the gendarmerie who make the ultimate decisions.

Watanabe came to know us in a roundabout manner, carefully planned to look accidental. We were coming to the end of our resources about that time, two months after the surrender, and were growing frantic in a proud, secretive, ladylike way. The girls had been stenographers before the war but couldn’t get jobs now, because almost nobody was doing any business. One day Irene encountered Mr. Kung, a Chinese who, as she vaguely remembered, had been a clerk in some firm for which she had worked. He was now splendidly prosperous as interpreter at the main gendarmerie office, down on the waterfront.

“I didn’t even know before the war that he could speak Japanese,” she told us when she came home. “And today he went out of his way to speak to me—crossed the street and everything. I wonder if he used to be in love with me and I never suspected. He seemed very much interested in my future, and he wants to get jobs for all of us. He says there are a lot of gendarmes who want to take English lessons, especially from people like us, because most Chinese girls aren’t good teachers, on account of the accent. He said they would pay well. What do you think?”

“Better not,” said Phyllis.

“It sounds fishy,” Irene said hesitantly.

“We don’t want them getting the Wrong Idea,” said Phyllis.

“Just what I said,” Irene retorted triumphantly. “I said to him, ‘Now, Mr. Kung, you must promise me there won’t be any funny business. We’re not that kind of girl.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, Mrs. Fincher; you don’t think I would let you in for anything embarrassing? My friend is a sincere man.

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